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Using ovfconverter from the tools directory, one can easily
convert previously exported Ganeti instance into OVF package, supported
by VMWare, VirtualBox and some other virtualization software. It is
also possible to use instance exported from such a tool and convert it
to Ganeti config file, used by gnt-backupimport command.

As the amount of Ganeti-specific details, that need to be provided in
order to import an external instance, is rather large, we will present
here some examples of importing instances from different sources.
It is also worth noting that there are some limitations regarding
support for different hardware.

Available modes for the network include bridged and routed.
There is no NIC mode, which is typically used e.g. by VirtualBox.
For most usecases this should not be of any effect, since if
NetworkSection contains any networks which are not discovered as
bridged or routed, the network mode is assigned automatically,
using Ganeti’s cluster defaults.

List of operating systems available on a cluster is viewable using
gnt-oslist command. When importing from external source, providing
OS type in a command line (--os-type=...) is required. This is
because even if the type is given in OVF description, it is not detailed
enough for Ganeti to know which os-specific scripts to use.
Please note, that instance containing disks may only be imported using
OS script that supports raw disk images.

format option should be set to vmdk in order for instance to be
importable by VMWare.

Presence of Ganeti section does seem to cause some problems and
therefore it is recommended to use --external option on export.

Import of compressed disks generated by ovfconverter was impossible in
current version of ovftool (2.1.0). This seems to be related to old
vmdk version. Since the conversion to vmdk format is done using
qemu-img, it is possible and in fact expected, that future versions
of the latter tool will resolve this problem.

If you are importing instance created using ovfconverterexport –
you most probably will not have to provide any additional information.
In that case, the following is all you need (unless you wish to change
some configuration options):

The disk space requirements for both import and export are at the moment
very large - we require free space up to about 3-4 times the size of
disks. This will most likely be changed in future versions.